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Although I became The Match Maven by accident (and what a happy one!), it’s no accident that I’m sharing these thoughts and stories with you. I hope that my insight and experiences, both personal and otherwise, will be entertaining and ultimately useful to you as you embark on your online dating journey. Learn from them. Maybe even laugh at my missteps. But most of all, don’t give up the dream!

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Wednesday, August 3, 2011

How Online Dating Taught Me To Be Myself

The other night my husband took me back to the barstool where we met almost two and a half years ago.

My online dating skills were a little rusty at the time, having taken a nearly year-long hiatus to date the “old-fashioned” way in Los Angeles. I thought I was pretty successful, but I managed to get blindsided and have my heart mangled two days before I moved back to New York. It was snowing at the platform at JFK where, wearing my ridiculously inappropriate LA “winter” coat, I hailed a cab. I shivered as I looked at the NYC skyline through the back window of the car, terrified of what I had to look forward to. It was January in New York. I was returning to my old life. And it was snowing. My sunny months learning to surf in LA felt like I’d closed my eyes and dreamed them. I blinked, and I was back in the cab, the lights of the Empire State Building looming ahead of me.

***

The other night my husband took me back to the barstool where we met almost two and a half years ago.

My online dating skills were a little rusty at the time, having taken a nearly year-long hiatus to date the “old-fashioned” way in Los Angeles. I thought I was pretty successful, but I managed to get blindsided and have my heart mangled two days before I moved back to New York. It was snowing at the platform at JFK where, wearing my ridiculously inappropriate LA “winter” coat, I hailed a cab. I shivered as I looked at the NYC skyline through the back window of the car, terrified of what I had to look forward to. It was January in New York. I was returning to my old life. And it was snowing. My sunny months learning to surf in LA felt like I’d closed my eyes and dreamed them. I blinked, and I was back in the cab, the lights of the Empire State Building looming ahead of me.

My parents came to visit me in the city and when they got in the car to drive home, I crawled into my mother’s lap and bawled like a toddler. My heart was broken. It was a one-two punch…I lost my relationship and LA within a matter of hours of each other. Had any of it existed?

A few weeks passed and neither my outlook nor the weather improved. And I made what I considered (and still consider) to be a reckless decision. I decided to go back online.

I wasn’t expecting much from the dates, really, because I wasn’t in a place for anything serious. I just wanted someone to tell me that I was pretty. I‘d have a glass of wine and some how-do-you-do conversation. I’d go home, knowing that there was hope out there…that although I was wounded, I would heal. (PS I don’t recommend this approach as the healthiest. But if you are staying honest with yourself…and those you are dating, I suppose it can work. Again, not ideal…)

As I walked toward Bar Veloce, my blue coat flapping in the wind behind me like Batman, I was on a mission. One glass of wine, and my science experiment would be over for the evening.

Except Adam was waiting for me outside on the sidewalk.

We sat at the barstools toward the back of the bar. I wore my first date outfit, recycled from my winter online dating days a year earlier. He made me laugh. I made him laugh. I told him about the voice message my mother had left on my phone the day before, the one that made my eyes well up a little: “Your father is peeling a Clementine and it makes me think of you. The scent of Clementines always reminds me of you, the way catching the scent of someone’s perfume makes you think of them when they aren’t there.” I explained that my mother was referring to my nearly obsessive consumption of the tiny oranges in the winter. I was also thinking of her rocking me in the front seat of the car, but I didn’t tell him that.

Three glasses of wine later, we walked arm in arm down Seventh Avenue toward the apartment where I was staying. “Look over there,” he pointed inside the corner deli. “What do you see?” I saw them, but I didn’t want to hope it was true. “Wait there.” He ran inside and came out with a crate of Clementines. He handed me the plastic bag and we walked to my door. He swears to this day that he knew that I was The One that night. “I had you hooked from the beginning,” he tells me now. “You just didn’t know it yet.”

As he said goodnight I thought it was all too much to believe. I wasn’t ready to meet him. I wasn’t ready to meet The One.

I peeled three Clementines every morning for breakfast for two weeks. And for two weeks, he crossed town after his workday just to see me for an hour before I had to start work, myself. We’d drink coffee. Once he made me a map of Long Island on the table, using silverware, torn sugar packets and wooden stirrers, describing where he grew up. At the end of each hour, I knew with even more certainty that he was a special man.

And one night, I received a very long letter in the mail…a fifty-page-long letter, to be precise…mailed to my work address. My ex in LA had taken it upon himself to rehash our relationship in black and white. The thesis of this tome: “Do I want to be with you? Yes. Am I sure about that? Probably not.” I was a wreck. I had agreed to meet Adam’s best friend for the first time that evening when I got out of work. I had to pull myself together. How could I let my ex him ruin the beginning of something that could be very good for me? It was unfair to me. It was unfair to Adam.

As the night drew to a close, Adam asked if I was all right, that I seemed a little subdued. And I told him the truth. For the first time, I admitted that I was coming out of something very painful in LA. We hadn’t spoken about it until then. I had been careful to leave that part of myself out of our new friendship. If I had been the Briana of a winter before, I would have continued to leave my ex in LA out of it. I would have wanted to be the "perfect" woman. I would have wanted to appear like I was the one to make his dreams-come-true, and dream girls don’t have issues with exes. In fact, dream girls don’t have issues, at all! I would have appeared available, when in truth I probably would have drifted away from Adam, unable to get close to someone who couldn’t know me, because I wouldn’t let him.

“We’re going to have to take things very slowly,” I cautioned him. “I was expecting a few mediocre dates when I got online. I wasn’t expecting you.”

He looked at me. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

I was stunned. I received a letter from a man who wasn’t sure if he wanted me. Here was a man who was willing to wait for me.

The next morning, I grabbed my coffee at Starbucks and received this text (Seriously. I wrote it down): “Thanks for being so honest with me. What often takes years to cultivate in a relationship is showing up bright and early in ours. Time is what I offer. Time to heal. Time to get to know me. Time to enjoy New York. Time to love. Time.”